“Don’t mess with Taiwan women,” production house Universe of Ladies said on stage in Taipei this morning, opening day two of this year’s TCCF and kicking off a series pitch lineup featuring strong female roles, AI, robots, ghosts and a Taiwanese version of Korean drama “Taxi Driver”.   

Universe of Ladies’ 10-episode black comedy/crime series, “Bad Habits”, is one of eight projects presented today as part of TCCF’s Series Pitch. 

Directed by Liu Ya-lin, “Bad Habits” is about four married women with perfect lives and untamed hearts who are willing to risk everything to prove they still matter. 

Kick-ass women are also central to CTK International and GrX Studio’s “Bang & Burn”, about a fugitive ex-CIA operative who raises her teen daughter as a spy to survive. When the hunt for the man who framed her leads to Taiwan, she has to decide what’s more difficult – surviving the great game or raising a child in the middle of it. 

The series pitches shifted to U.S.-based Salty Pictures Development’s “Group 41”, about the first Asian-American DEA squad and the prosecutor known as “The Dragon Lady”, who brought down the Asian heroin trade between 1986 and 1996. 

The 10-episode crime/suspense/period drama is adapted from “The Incredible Story of DEA Group 41 & The Rise and Fall of the Asian Heroin Trade” by Singapore-born producer/writer, Aidan Swift and Jonah Greenberg. 

The six-episode social issue French comedy “SAGA” took the pitches into the future, where a regulatory quota for “human-authored” content throws four forgotten screenwriters back together. Their low-budget no-filter series becomes an unlikely hit and a mirror for the very lives they thought had ended. The series was presented by BiZ Productions and Elephant Story. 

The other four series pitches were:

• Korea’s “My Custom Boy” from Channel A, about a workaholic CEO who decides to take a marriage with a custom-built boyfriend robot; 
   
• Mirror Media’s “Leaf and Tree”, adapted from the novel “The Vow of Banana Leaf and Tree” about an injured teen baseball player who helps the ghost of a century-old boy on a journey home and a promise that transcends life and death;
   
• Japanese producer Seika Works “The 16th Night Kitchen”, set in a small midnight kitchen at the border between life and death and a chef who has cooked for the dead for 100 years;
   
• Model Universe Co’s “Sunlight Delivery”, adapted from the Korean series “Taxi Driver”. The 12-episode crime drama is about a rogue logistics courier service dispensing vigilante justice who is betrayed and targeted by a ruthless syndicate.